why not OS X?

[Konstantin Riabitsev]

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On Tue, 2002-06-04 at 21:55, Timothy A. Seufert wrote:
> See http://software.bombich.com/ccc.html .  Free tool.  It's nothing=20
> more than an AppleScript which copies files around using command line=20
> tools included with the system, but it makes creating images or=20
> cloning drives quite easy.

Cool, I'll suggest it to our MUG people, thanks.

> Not at all, as per above you can use CCC to clone OS X installs.  You=20
> just get one source machine into a config that you like, and clone it=20
> to distribution media, for which there are several options.  (You=20
> could even use FireWire hard drives for this purpose -- many newer=20
> Macs can boot from them, and restoration off of one should be much=20
> faster than restore off of CD media.)

Ok, so cloning an OS X is about as convenient as cloning a windows box,
which means it's not convenient at all. :)

Consider my problem:=20
We have about 6 different types of installations. On Red Hat it works
like so:

1. We have a central repository of RPM packages, updated with the latest
fixes from Red Hat (yup tree).
2. We have 6 kickstart ks.conf files.
3. When I need to install, I turn on the machine and select "Linux
Install" from the PXE menu. That's the last thing I do -- I then walk
away and go do other things.
4. Machine downloads the correct kickstart config file (specified via
DHCP) and installs all necessary packages.=20
5. After the installation is complete, it copies over the backed up
configuration files and reboots.
6. Done -- machine is installed and fully patched.

Now, for OS X:

1. We have 6 different CD's with images, or 6 different firewire drives
with images, since a lot of our installations are over 700Mb.
2. Whenever a system update comes out, I have to redo all 6 of them,
unless I want to run software update right after they reinstall.
3. To reinstall the system, I have to go to it, put in the CD, or plug
in the firewire, then wait till it finishes copying, run the software
update if my install media is not patched, and then go away.
4. I guess there can be a script that will go out and restore the
configuration after the system comes up after reboot.

The disadvantages of this are:
1. You have to keep all copies of your installation classes constantly
updated, which means either constantly burning new CD's or disk-copying
images over onto firewire drives. This is far less convenient than
having one centralized repository.
2. Admin time spent reinstalling a box in our case is about 1 minute.
For this system it's more like 30 minutes.
3. As is always the case with cloning, your hardware needs to be mostly
identical for the system to boot correctly after the image is copied
onto the hdd. In our case this is not a problem at all -- we have the
same 6 kickstart files for ALL of our boxes, be they celerons, pentium
II's, or dual athlon 1800+'s.

Like I said, this is more convenient than doing install from Apple's
media, but still a far cry from the convenience of our system.

Regards,
--=20
 0>  Konstantin ("Icon") Riabitsev
/ )  Duke Physics Systems Admin, RHCE
 ~   www.duke.edu/~icon/pubkey.asc

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